There was a moment, sitting in the theatre watching Mardaani, when I knew that I was going to be swimming upstream against opinion in my view of the film. I’ve walked out of precisely one film in my long film-watching life, and quite honestly, if it hadn’t been for three things, I might well have walked out of Mardaani as well.

First, we’d driven a long way to this theatre, and I wasn’t alone. If I walked out, I would have had to leave Mr. Totally Filmi behind, and since he was the one with the car keys, I figured I should just sit it out (aside: Mr. T.F. liked the film, and I think he was a little surprised at my reaction to it).

Second, the themes the film deals with – specifically the issue of the human sex trafficking trade, but also the idea hinted at in the title, that “manliness: what does it mean to be manly, not only for the women in this film, but for the men themselves? I have very little respect for men who think it’s “manly” to bed little girls, or for men who think it’s quite all right to kidnap them and force them into those beds. I’m also quite sure that I don’t think female empowerment has much to do with being “manly” – behaving like men (to be fair, I saw that clip where Rani explained the title as translating more to “warriorlike”, and I won’t disagree that sometimes women need to learn to stand up for themselves and take care of themselves, if that’s how we’re going to define “warriorlike”). But those are interesting ideas to think about, and I wanted to see how they played out in the film.

Thirdly, Rani Mukherjee. I have to say, the key thing that kept me in my seat was Rani Mukeherjee’s fine, fine performance. Rani truly gets into the skin of her character, Shivani Shivaji Roy. Roy is a sub-inspector with the crime branch in Mumbai. She’s also a wife and a surrogate mother to both her niece, and to Pyaari, an adolescent whom she has rescued from the railway station and on whom she keeps a watchful eye. When Pyaari goes missing, Shivani begins to investigate her disappearance, and what she finds is the tip of a very deep iceberg of trade in young girls. When Shivani is contacted by Karan Rastogi (AKA “Walt”, in a hat tip to the very popular television series Breaking Bad), his intention is to offer her a bribe to get her to drop the investigation. He offers her a penthouse apartment. She refuses, asking him how she’ll get to it when the elevator is, inevitably, out of service. What Shivani demands is the return of Pyaari. When Karan refuses – Pyaari has seen too much of his operation, making her a threat to it – Shivani lets him know that she plans to hunt him down and take Pyaari back.

There is, actually, a lot – quite a lot -- that I like about Mardaani. I love Shivani Shivaji Roy – love that she’s a tough cop, that she’s respected by the other cops she works with. She’s smart, she’s knowledgeable (the scene where she delivers a tight slap for every infraction she cites serves cleverly to underline this). She’s also a typical working woman, bringing home take-away when she’s arriving home too late to cook, combing her niece’s hair before setting off to work – thankfully, Mardaani gives us a central female character who feels real, and Rani Mukherjee takes her and makes us want to cheer for her at every step of the way.

There are a lot of smartly written scenes and clever dialogues, as well as a few really fine supporting performances. I love Shivani’s coworkers and her relationship with them – they treat her as an equal, as evidenced by the banter they share as well as their well orchestrated work relationship. Shivani is a tough, honest cop, but she also knows that some methods work better than others at getting information. One of the film’s fine moments involves her trying to get information out of Rehman, who she and her team recently busted. He knows she’s trying to bribe information out of him by offering up some biryani. She knows he knows it. He offers her what she needs, not because of that bribe, but only because, as he tells her, of the children involved.

So it’s an enormous frustration for me that a film that can get these kinds of details right – that has characters that step beyond a stereotype, that has scenes and dialogues so deftly and delicately written – can also get so much wrong. There are just as many performances here that strike a wrong note as those that soar. Shivani’s husband is nothing more than a blip in the film – frankly, it felt as if he was only there as a kind of convenient vehicle for a bit of payback/warning for Shivani when she gets too close to Karan’s operation (irony: the husband is treated just like a heroine in a typical hero-centred film might be). Karan himself is kind of an interesting character, and played beautifully and with restraint by relative newcomer Tahir Bhasin. But most of the villains in this film, those involved in the illegal drug and sex trades, well, they’re stereotypes and cyphers, too. I suspect, too, that for me, Mardaani suffered in comparison to the 2013 Malayalam language film Thira. Directed by Vineeth Srineevasan, Thira explored a similar subject matter in a similar style, but did so with much greater delicatesse.

The scene that had me contemplating walking out of the film is also the scene that made me feel incredibly physically ill – it’s the rape of Pyaari by the client who purchases her. This came on the heels of several scenes in which Pyaari and the other girls who have been kidnapped are forceably stripped, foreceably showered, and forced to remove the thin blankets they’ve been given so that they may be “sorted” into appropriate bits of the trade, some as higher end prostitutes, some merely as mules for the drug trade. I understand the need to create some kind of response in the audience, that these are issues that are difficult to think about, difficult to face. But they have to be faced if anything is to be done about this horrible, horrible trade in young girls. There is, however, a line between forcing the audience to face these horrors and contemplate them with an eye to making them think about the issues, and maybe act on that when they leave the theatre; there is a line between that and a kind of voyeurism, and I think, for me, that Mardaani crossed that line at some point. Maybe it was one too many scenes of girls being degraded; maybe it was the soft, artful lighting used to imply delicacy in dealing with Pyaari’s rape. It’s one of those terrible conundrums, too – how do you know when the line between decency and voyeurism has been crossed? How do you even know where it is? Possibly it’s different for every viewer, but for me, it was just too much, and I was never able to enjoy what was truly good in this film after that.

The film is at its best when it focusses on the cat and mouse game happening between Shivani and Karan, but it also manages to dissipate much of the tension that game should generate. And in the film’s final scenes – when I suppose the appropriate response would have been to cheer for Shivani and the girls as they apply a balm of vigilante justice to make up for the injustice dealt to them – well, mostly I was just glad it was over.

And those final scenes bring me back to the film’s title – what does it mean to be “manly” – or even, what does it mean to be warriorlike, if I go with the translation preferred by the film’s makers? Is being empowered, for a woman, merely to behave just like a man? To behave just as badly as men, in the case of the woman who works “taking care” of the girls, or in the case of Karan’s mother? Is this how we want to right wrongs, by taking justice into our own hands and beating the crap out of those who treat us unjustly? It’s not how I view empowerment. And it’s not how I view justice – I’d prefer to see us work towards fixing systems that allow this kind of criminal activity to go unpunished or to be ignored; systems that treat victims as if they have something to be ashamed of. And I’d even take an imperfect system over the kind of popular vigilantism suggested by Shivani in the film’s climax.

But please, whatever happens – give me another film with a role like this one for Rani Mukerjee. Give me Shivani Shivaji Roy in an investigation worthy of her talents.

On the busy day of a celebratory function in an apartment building, nine people end up stuck in the building’s elevator. All of them are, in some way, connected with a mysterious woman (Meghna Raj), who ends up dead on top of the elevator.

Okay, so that sounds like a bit of a spoiler, especially since we are not sure what has happened to the mysterious woman in question until just before the interval, when an attempt to escape from the stuck elevator reveals her unfortunate presence atop it to everyone inside (including her own son, who thinks she’s just sleeping). But to be honest, Up & Down doesn’t really get moving until the discovery of the dead body – it’s at this point that the Commissioner of Police, Siyaad (K. B. Ganesh Kumar, whose son, Devamaran, plays the little boy), begins an investigation into the death from inside the elevator. It’s an interesting premise, and one that allows the confinement in a small space to play a part in helping peel back the layers of the mystery. Each person’s story of how they knew the woman and where they were prior to her disappearance and subsequent rediscovery plays a part in piecing together our understanding of who she was, and why she was such a frequent visitor to the building.

I’ve read that T.K. Rajeev Kumar decided not to include songs in the film (apart from a promotional number that appears in the film’s closing credits) because he didn’t want to break the rhythm of the film. It helps, but doesn’t completely deal with the problems of pacing in a film that doesn’t really find its rhythm until after the interval. Problematic, too, are the attempts to insert humour into the film, which mostly fall flat -- Kochu Preman’s drunken lift repairman could have, actually, provided the occasional welcome break in the tension if it had been directed with a more deft hand. A scene in which the writer Edathil (Prathap Pothen) is supposedly talking to the mystery woman whilst on a bus is totally ruined by allowing the antics of his seat neighbour to take our attention away from the conversation (true confession: I totally wanted to smack the actor pretending to sleep and crawl all over Prathap Pothen and tell him to dial it down a notch. Rarely do I feel so annoyed watching a film.)

And if I’m frustrated by stuff like this, it’s because, mostly, there are some good actors in this film, who mostly deliver good performances, and who are let down occasionally by the director’s decisions. That said -- just when I thought I’d figured out what was going on in Up & Down, the film delivered a serious plot twist that was just brilliant. And, then, it proceeded to do it a second time. Add to this Jomon Thomas’s beautiful cinematography – you would think that wouldn’t be something you’d particularly notice in a film shot mostly in a plywood box lined with metal, but Thomas’s work is outstanding, particularly in one of the film’s key scenes, where he manages to make a brutal moment incredibly beautiful at the same time.

Up & Down is one of those films that fell into my “mandatory Indrajith filmography watching” basket, and he doesn’t disappoint. His lift operator, Thampuran, is in the perfect position to know everyone’s secrets, but through his interactions with the mystery woman, we come to learn that he has secrets of his own, and, he’s not as well versed in the secrets of others as he thought he was, a mistake that could prove costly.

Good, Bad, and Ugly has a running time of about an hour and forty-five minutes. I think it's important for me to mention that, because it took me about an hour of that (a spot well past the interval break) to figure out why it didn't work.

Because it takes about that long for any of the characters at all to have much in the way of motivation. Up until that point, they are just a bunch of characters, most of whom I don't like, and don't really carry about. There isn't anything about the film that comes together as a cohesive story.

Essentially, the plot, such as it is, is this: on a hartal day, a bunch of guys get a lift in a car driven by Suraj Venjaramoodu. It's unclear to me why it's important that it's a hartal day, except that, perhaps, it's the only way to justify Suraj Venjaramoodu's character giving them all a lift.

There's also a young woman who has a sister who needs an operation, but they don't have the money for it. She's (the young woman, not the sister) in love with one of the guys in the car, but he can't round up the money to help, so she agrees to marry someone else who will provide the money for the sister's operation.

One of the guys (who is trying to get some money for something else, but I'm confused as to whether he's the guy that ran into trouble with the health deparment over selling bad shwarma to a customer, or if that's the *other* other guy) steals a phone from the glovebox of the car driven by Suraj Venjaramoodu. On it is something that makes a big businessman nervous, enough that he pays up some blackmail money.

In the meantime, the guy who couldn't help out his girlfriend gets a job with the businessman's company, and he's asked to take care of the blackmailer. Nudge nudge, wink wink, here's your gun.

And the whole time I was watching this, I was getting more and more irritated that I couldn't remember any of the character's names, or what they did, but essentially, the film doesn't make it easy. It's a series of scenes and events stitched together, but in no way do they make a cohesive whole. By the time that you can figure out what's going on, how everyone is connected, the film is all but over. And at that point, there's an awful, awful rape scene. And right on the heels of that, an item number in a club. Up until then, I was trying to piece everything together. After that, I no longer cared.

I'm not going to make the obvious joke using the film's title. I'm not going to say, "I watched this so you don't have to." But I did. So you don't.

Dadasaheb Phalke’s 1919 film Kaliya Mardan ("The Vanquishing of Kaliya") was, like his previous film featuring the god Krishna, Shri Krishna Janma ("The Birth of Krishna"), by all accounts a smashing success. It’s a perfect example of Phalke’s use of cinema to support the concept of Swadeshi – Krishna’s vanquishing of the snake god Kaliya could be, and certainly was, seen as a commentary on the contemporary political situation in India. Phalke’s audiences understood the connection that was being made, the comparison of the concept of evil, represented by Kaliya, to British Colonial rule. In fact, there are reports that at the end of screenings people stood up and shouted nationalist slogans, as well as singing devotional songs.

That doesn’t mean that Phalke’s film was a tedious or heavy-handed means of passing on political or social commentary – far from it. In fact, the film is joyous and delightful at every step. Krishna’s defeat of Kaliya comes at the very end of a series of scenes that illustrate both the mischevious and benevolent nature of Krishna, even as a child. When Krishna is given a gift of mangos, he gives them away, which, as a title card reveals:

When Krishna’s friends have water thrown on them by a village woman, Krishna leads them in taking revenge upon her, by stealing butter from her house and making it look as if she’s the culprit. Krishna’s antics also involve tying together the beard and hair of a sleeping couple, and drawing a picture of a cow on a wall, all the while listening to the villagers who have come to complain about him to his parents.

These same villagers are seen leaving their chores, drawn away by Krishna’s flute playing near the river, where they gather and dance to his tunes.

And when Krishna climbs a tree and falls into the river, they gather at the riverside, their distress palpable. Sadness turns to joy when Krishna rises out of the river on the head of Kaliya, having soundly vanquished him. Kaliya’s wives garland Krishna, and the villagers pull Krishna out of the river, hugging and kissing him, dancing with joy, and, ultimately, blessing him for his great feat.

The thing that strikes me about Kaliya Mardan is how much it reminds me of modern Indian films, so timeless is its fimmaking. The use of familiar themes (especially those from Hindu mythology) to comment on touchy political or social situations; the use of both comedy tracks as well as drama; the use of song and dance – it may seem odd to think of song and dance in a silent film, but it’s there in Kaliya Mardan, and it’s just as entertaining as it is in modern Indian films, as is the rather ripping underwater sequence in which Krishna fights with Kaliya:

However, Kaliya Mardan wouldn’t be what it is without the talented and adorable Mandakini Phalke in the role of Krishna. The film opens with Mandakini reading what is purported to be the film’s script. The image dissolves, and Mandakini becomes Krishna.

Dressed as Krishna, she proceeds to give us, as the title card states, a:

I have no words to express how happy Mandakini Phalke's performance makes me, and how charmed I am every time I watch Phalke's film.

I am thrilled to be part of the Classic Movie History Project Blogathon, organized by Movies Silently,Silver Screenings, and Once Upon a Screen. By the time I decided to toss my hat in the virtual ring, there were three years left to choose from -- one of them being 1919. It felt as if the fates were calling, because 1919 happens to be the year that one of my favourite films of all time, D.G. Phalke's Kaliya Mardan, was made.

It’s almost impossible to try to encapsulate the magic of D.G. Phalke (more popularly known as Dadasaheb Phalke), but his importance as the “father of Indian cinema” is inestimable. The Dadasaheb Phalke award, established in 1969 (the centenary of Phalke’s birth), is the highest honour in cinema, awarded by the Indian government to recognize lifetime contribution to Indian cinema.

Phalke himself was, and remains, a fascinating figure: The son of a Sanskrit scholar, he studied both art (his studies included ceramics, photolithography and blockmaking) and architecture. A proficient landscape painter, he went on to learn how to develop and print film negatives. Fascinated by an itinerant German illusionist, Phalke himself learned the art of magic and began giving public performances under the name Professor Kelpha.

If all this were not fascinating enough, Phalke moved to Lonavala around 1908 and began Phalke’s Art Printing and Engraving works. Lonavala was, importantly, the home of Ravi Varma Press, an important chromolithographic press originally owned by renowned Malayalam artist Raja Ravi Varma. It is suggested that Phalke might have also worked at Ravi Varma Press, but he almost certainly produced prints of Ravi Varma’s paintings (Varma himself saw the production of prints of his works as a way to reach the masses and perhaps encourage interest in the arts).

Phalke, then, can be seen as a kind of jack-of-all-trades – or someone, these days, we might call a multi-disciplinary artist. If Paresh Mokashi's 2009 Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory (about Phalke's attempts to make his first film, Raja Harishchandra. Phalke called his studio a "factory" to make it less of a stigma for his artists to come and work for him), captures Phalke’s personality even remotely, he can be seen as a kind of curious, inventive, passionate genius.

Phalke’s relationship with cinema began sometime around 1910 or 1911 – Phalke saw the film The Life of Christ in a Bombay cinema, and it completely turned his life upside down. Phalke found himself both moved by the images he viewed, and excited by the possibilities of taking this new medium and creating something uniquely Indian. The importance of this must be emphasized: Phalke felt that he could make cinema that would contribute to the Swadeshi Movement, a part of the Indian Independence Movement that emphasized self-sufficiency through the revival of indigenous industry and production. Phalke set about bringing mythological themes to the silver screen, not necessarily as a means to inspire devotion, but, simply, he felt them the best way to reach out to people. It’s important to keep in mind, watching what remains of Phalke’s films, is that these are stories/themes that people would have been very familiar with, and for a Westerner, making oneself familiar with the stories is definitely a help in understanding them.

In 1912, after acquiring financing from the photographic equipment dealer Yeshwant Nadkarni (Phalke showed him a short trick film entitled The Birth of a Pea Plant, an event recreated in Paresh Mokashi's Harishchandrachi Factory) Phalke headed off to London where he acquired a Williamson camera, Kodak negative film, and a film perforator. He also used the opportunity to approach Walton Studios and to be tutored by Cecil Hepworth (one of the founders of the British film industry). On his return to Bombay, he established Phalke Films, under which banner he made five films, including the one considered the first Indian feature film – Raja Harishchandra.

Phalke’s initial ventures into filmmaking are also interesting because they are, in essence, also family ventures. The Phalke’s kitchen was turned into a laboratory; a family friend, Trymbak B. Talang, was trained to use the camera; Phalke’s wife, Saraswati, took on many different tasks, including perforating film stock. His children also appeared in his films, most notably his daughter Mandakini, the 7-year old star of Kaliya Mardan.

That said, Phalke was almost a one-man cinema show – writing, shooting, directing, editing – in fact, Phalke was a master at both editing and special effects, and part of the enjoyment of his films comes as much from the spectacles he creates as from the stories he is portraying on screen.

His 1919 film Kaliya Mardan (“The Death of Kaliya”) is a perfect example of all of this. Kaliya is a poisonous snake god, and as one version of the story goes, one day, the god Krishna was playing ball with some herdboys, when the ball fell into the river. Krishna went into the river to retrieve the ball, and the snake Kaliya entrapped him by wrapping himself around Krishna. Krishna escaped by making himself so big that Kaliya could no longer hold him. Then Krishna danced on the snake’s head (after taking on the weight of the whole Universe, of course), and Kaliya began to die. Kaliya’s wives came and prayed to Krishna; Kaliya recognized Krishna’s greatness and promised not to bother anyone ever again; Krishna pardoned Kaliya and banished him from the river.

“The 5,000 or so dabbawalas in the city have an astounding service record. Every working day they transport more than 130,000 lunch boxes throughout Mumbai, the world’s fourth-most-populous city. That entails conducting upwards of 260,000 transactions in six hours each day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year (minus holidays), but mistakes are extremely rare.”

- Stefan Thomke, Harvard Business Review, Nov. 1, 2012

It’s one of those “extremely rare” mistakes that Stefan Thomke writes about that results in the dabba (lunchbox) that Ila (Nimrat Kaur) has prepared for her husband landing on the desk of Saajan (Irrfan Khan). Ila is a housewife whose busy husband ignores her, prompting her to take the advice of the upstairs Auntie to spice up their relationship by spicing up the food she puts in his dabba; Saajan is a widowed, middle-aged government claims adjuster whose weariness and sadness envelop him. When Ila realizes that the special dabba she has prepared that day has gone to someone other than her husband, she sends a note with the next one, and what begins as a mere exchange about the quality of Ila’s cooking (“Dear Ila,” writes Saajan tersely, “the food was salty today.” Ila’s response is to send a perfectly salted but chili-laden dish the next day) evolves into an exchange of memories, ideas, reflections on life and on the nature of happiness.

Writer-director Ritesh Batra’s first feature film is delicately and meticulously crafted, its characters deftly etched. We never see Upstairs Auntie, Mrs. Deshpande (veteran Marathi and Hindi actor Bharati Achrekar), but the layers of her character and her life with her own husband are revealed through her exchanges with Ila, and with the letters Ila shares with Saajan. Similarly, Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Aslam Shaikh appears at first to be just an overly eager upstart, keen to take over after Saajan’s retirement; but Batra peels back his layers like a proverbial onion, endearing him to the audience, and having him gradually worm his way into the life of the melancholic Saajan. It helps, too, that Siddiqui is a fine actor who is able to translate that in another of the film’s fine, nuanced performances. Batra’s film is also an incredible homage to the dabbawalas of Mumbai, despite that one mistake that trips up their otherwise impeccable delivery record. Their work, what it takes to transport those many, many lunchboxes everyday, is woven deftly into the film’s fabric, just as it is woven in to the fabric of Mumbai.

Irrfan Khan’s ability to slip into the skin of a character and to make us feel what he is feeling has never been more present than it is in The Lunchbox. His Saajan believes he is an old man, and we feel the weight of that in Khan’s every movement, in his face, in his eyes. In the course of the film, Khan transforms him from a man feeling at the end of everything into a man who realizes he isn’t old, he just feels old; into a man who suddenly realizes that he still has things to look forward to, to dream about – and he does it with a subtletly and delicacy that is, truly, breathtaking.

Nimrat Kaur is a perfect counterpoint to Khan, equal to him in her expressiveness and ability to shift it every so subtly. She brings incredible grace and radiance to the character of Ila, revealing the lively spirit that still bubbles under the surface of the stifling existence of a middle-class housewife with nothing to do but look after her daughter, fix her husband’s lunch, and wait for him to spare her a few moments of his time.

When I spoke with Irrfan Khan on the red carpet at TIFF, he suggested that The Lunchbox was not only a very romantic film, but also an incredibly sensual one – and in the most literal sense of that word (that is, that which appeals to the senses) he is right. Most obvious is the film’s connection to food through the dabba that Ila prepares each day – each dish more mouthwatering than the next. But the film also appeals to other senses as well, with fans that whirr overhead, and trains that clatter. “Paradesi, Paradesi” from Raja Hindustani plays on Ila’s radio; children busking on the train Saajan travels on sing it, too. Ila sniffs her husband’s shirts, and that tells us more about her life than if Batra had merely scripted it out.

Batra gives us a story rooted in India, in Mumbai, in a city where people live, work, struggle, where they eat from a dabba, or perhaps only have two bananas for lunch; a city where people can feel old, nameless, faceless; yet a city filled with joy and life as well as sadness. And yet, it’s a film that asks questions that could apply to any place. Does it matter that the wrong train gets you to the right station, as Aslam notes it sometimes does? Or that, as Ila suggests, sometimes the right train gets you to the wrong one? In the end, all that matters is that you get on a train, any train, travelling in any direction, and that you keep moving forward. “What do we live for?” Ila asks Saajan in one of her letters to him, and it’s a question that, perhaps, forms the core of Batra’s film. In the midst of it all, Batra asks the question that we all consider at one point in our lives, no matter who we are, where we live, what our social status: What do we live for? Somewhere along the way during their exchange of letters and lives, Ila and Saajan each find an answer to that question – one that transforms them, and which shows them the possibilities that life still holds for them.

“My father told me,” says director Pan Nalin, “I should
travel to the ultimate pilgrimage of Hindus, Kumbh Mela, and fetch him a bottle
of holy water. He told me that the Kumbh Mela is the biggest gathering on
earth, and there I shall feel the force of faith that connects us all.”

Nalin decides to bring his father back some
stories along with his bottle of water, and the result is the incredible Faith Connections, having its World
Premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Nalin brings us the stories of pilgrims and
policemen, of sadhus and small children – stories of people like Hatha Yogi
Baba and Baby Bajrangi, Mamta Devi and Sonu and their missing son, Sandeep, the
sadhus Vivekanandji and Umeshji; and, perhaps most importantly, the story of
ten-year old Kishan Tiwari, who has run away from home, and who claims to be an
orphan, when he isn’t joking about becoming an underworld Don, or considering
his own future as a sadhu. Through them,
Nalin reveals to us that force of faith, and the strange and surprising ways it
connects people.

There is (not surprisingly given the nature of the Kumbh
Mela) a distinct focus on the sadhus for much of the film, naked, ganja-smoking,
yoga-performing or otherwise (including the Pant-Shirt Baba and the iPad Baba,
each taking their name for their decidely un-sadhu-like clothing wearing and
iPad use); and yet, what I take away from the film is something that reminds me
of my reaction to one of Nalin’s previous films, Samsara (also a film that explored, in part, the ramifications of children placed in Buddhist monestaries at a very young age)– the place
of children, whether lost (like little Sandeep, whose family searches for him
endlessly), abandoned (like tiny Bajrangi, abandoned at birth, and being raised
by a sadhu who, it is obvious, adores the child, and acts as mother and father
to him); or a runaway, like Kishan, wise beyond his years and yet filled with
more sadness than a boy his age should be, “master of all at such tender age”,
as one of the Mela’s food vendors describes him. “Energy flows,” says one of
the sadhus, talking about Kishan, “but which path will it choose?” If there was
one thing he was sure of, though, was that whatever Kishan chose to do, he’d be
the best at it. The stories of these children will alternately break your heart
and also fill it with great joy.

Nalin’s camera gives us the view of the vastness of the Kumbh Mela
and the sheer magnitude of the numbers of people attending it. People come, people go, crossing footbridges
set out across the river, wandering through camps. But he also pulls in, giving us views of
people’s faces, their feet, their hands, allowing us to forge a very personal and
emotional connection with the people whose stories are unfolding on screen. Nalin doesn’t have to lecture us about the
nature of faith, of renunciation, of wonder – his camera shows it to us, the
people he follows enlighten us about it through their stories. I found myself praying throughout the film for
the safe return of Sandeep; that Kishan would find a way to stay safe and would
not become the Don he jokes about; that Hatha Yogi Baba’s hopes for Bajrangi –
that he will attend a proper school – will be fulfilled.

Nalin gives us a film filled with sadness and joy; with
tenderness, devotion; with gentle humour and with incredible seriousness. There are many, many people who come to the
Kumbh Mela, many lives transformed, and many stories. Nalin shares only a few with us, but oh, how
interesting and inspiring they are, and to experience them is to understand
what faith truly is, how it connects people in ways we might never have imagined;
and that, in an uncertain world, miracles do sometimes happen.

Faith Connections will be shown three times at the Toronto
International Film Festival:

One of the highlights of my year is when Megabirthday roles around -- it's so enjoyable to see what Cinema Chaat will present for our amusement, entertainment, and, of course, delight.

So when Temple suggested that this year might involve an exploration of Chiranjeevi's socks, I knew what I had to do. I was going to be spending a week in July at dye camp, and first on my list of priorities was to dye a sock yarn that would be worthy of being worn by the Megastar.

But what to do? What colour to choose? I asked Temple for advice, and what I took away was the idea of black, hot pink, and metallic. What I came up with? Was this:

I started with that single hank of hot pink yarn on the far left. I wanted to make sure I could get that colour Just Right before I started to play around with combinations of pink and black. In the end, I dyed two hanks of plain sock yarn, starting with pink, and overdyeing with black, and two hanks of yarn with silver stellina in it, starting with black and overdyeing with pink.

What I was trying to do was capture the essence of the Megastar: I wanted something colourful and bold, and yet masculine. Something masculine, but for a man willing to wear glitter with abandon!

And what I really love was how this tied in with the first Chiranjeevi film I watched in its entirety, for last year's Megabirthday celebration, Yamudiki Mogudu, especially with this song, especially starting around 2:38:

I really loved the opportunity to try this out, and I am absolutely looking forward to dyeing more yarns inspired by the movies I watch. I'd really like to work on this Megabirthday colourway a little more, too. Maybe for next year I'll actually knit up a pair of socks.

There must be some irony in the fact that I attended the screening of Abhishek Kapoor’s latest film, Kai Po Che, with two female blogging pals, Dolce and Larissa – in fact, we discussed the fact that Indian cinema is overdue for a female version of the friends bonding/coming of age film. And no, Aisha doesn’t count. The fact that Kai Po Che’s English tagline is “Brothers for Life” announces in no uncertain terms that the film is following in the tradition of films like Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Fortunately, though, Kai Po Che doesn’t attempt to echo or compete with either of those films.

I will admit to approaching Kai Po Che with some trepidation. I’m not in the camp of people who willingly excoriate everything writer Chetan Bhagat does, but I will admit to being absolutely frustrated by his work. As Dolce points out, Bhagat’s Five Point Someone was a decently written book, but what set it truly apart were its themes (which were completely ruined in the film 3 Idiots – in fact, Bhagat should perhaps be grateful they didn’t credit him properly on the film, because the film completely missed the point of the message he was trying to convey in his book. And whatever you think of Bhagat’s writing, the man has his pulse on what a young generation of Indians are thinking, what they are dreaming, and if his books are wildly popular amongst that generation, it’s because of that fact alone). The Three Mistakes of My Life, the book on which Kai Po Che is based, is more frustrating: if I were Bhagat’s editor, that book would never have seen the light of day without a rewrite. I would have sent it back to him covered in red pencil marks, and I would have excised great swaths of it, including the ending. However: what I would have left in place was the core of the book, its themes, its messages. That’s what the makers of 3 Idiots got wrong, and it’s what the makers of Kai Po Che got so very right.

The film is set in Gujurat at the turn of the 21st century, the year 2000 already setting us up for the events we know are coming: the tour of the Australian cricket team and the test matches with India in 2001, the massive earthquake in 2001, and the communal violence that exploded after the Godhra train burning in 2002. This may seem like a broad canvas of events, but the time period is cleverly chosen to show how all of these real-life events change the lives of the film’s three protagonists, Govind (Raj Kumar Yadav) , Omi (Amit Sadh), and Ishaan (Sushant Singh Rajput).

Like many of their generation, the lives of these three friends have no meaning, no direction. They may have dreams, like Govind, who wants to go into business to make something of his life; or their dreams are already shattered, like those of Ishaan, who couldn’t translate his cricket success at school into anything more than an obsession with the game, and not much desire to do anything else except watch matches; or they’re like Omi, who knows what he doesn’t want – he doesn’t want to be a priest like his father – but beyond that, he has no idea what he does want to do with his life, except he wants it to be different than that of his parents.

Fortunately, Govind has a business plan that would give all three of their lives purpose: they open a sports shop and cricket academy (with academic tutoring on the side). Coaching cricket serves to channel some of Ishaan’s fiery, brash, impetuous personality, and his discovery of a local cricket prodigy, Ali (Digvijay Deshmukh), gives him someone and something to care about beyond himself. Govind is in his element managing the business, but his two friends, and his budding relationship with Ishaan’s equally impetuous sister, Vidya (Amrita Puri) serve to show him there is more to life than just watching the bottom line. And Omi? Omi is the one with the family connections, who uses them to first help get them a shop outside the temple where his father is a priest, and then to smooth over their financial difficulties by getting a loan from his uncle (the local Hindu party candidate). Like so many young people who have no definite plan for their lives, Omi finds himself drawn into the world of politics out of obligation for their debt to his uncle. But the film shows how fine the line is for someone like Omi to slide easily into the world of partisan politics. Working for his uncle’s party gives Omi the purpose and direction his life needs, makes him useful both to his family and to his friends, but with, as the film reveals, the possibility of terrible consequences.

There is that view that the three constants in India are politics, cricket and Bollywood, and Kai Po Che manages to combine all of these in a way that is engaging and thoughtful. If it fumbles, and it does, it’s in those moments where the attention is taken away from how the larger events influence the lives and actions of the film’s three leads and places it on the events themselves. The film is at its best when it focuses on the friendship of these three young men, representing the reality of such a deep, lifelong bond with its highs and its lows. Each of these friends bring out both the best and the worst in each other, and along the way, they each grow a little, rounding out each other’s rough edges as they begin their journey towards responsible adulthood.

What makes this friendship work so well, too, are the performances of the film’s three leads. Raj Kumar Yadav has already become a Totally Filmi Casa Favourite with his roles in films like Talaash and, most especially, Shahid (which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2012). His Govind is sweet and shy, and his blossoming relationship with Vidya (a young woman who clearly knows what she wants, played delightfully by another Casa Fave, Amrita Puri) opens his eyes to a world beyond that of his magical numbers. Sushant Singh Rajput’s Ishaan is probably the character with the least development, but Rajput still manages to show us the conflict in Ishaan’s personality between the coach he is becoming, and the player he once was, making us wonder if he really understands the reasons why Ali is so important to him. Amit Sadh’s Omi is, perhaps, the surprise package of the three, taking Omi from the perpetual third wheel to someone who ends up truly broken by the events he ends up caught up in.

In a recent interview with journalist Aseem Chhabra, Chetan Bhagat stated that he thought the film was better than his book on which it based. And on that, he is absolutely right. The irony here is that everything I would have pulled from the book if I’d edited it? Is not in the film. Instead, the film gives us an emotional and touching look at the friendship of these three young men. The film may rely on all-too-familiar events as its backdrop, but Amit Trivedi’s music gives it a freshness and youthful drive that resonate with the story, and its three leads engage us from the moment we see them together on screen. There are moments I love these characters, and moments I love them less– but at every moment, I was glad to be able to share in their friendship, to experience them as real and human and flawed and yet perfect in all their imperfection.